HIST 6010: Historiography Class Guide

Finding Books

WestCat/Library Catalog
WestCat is one of the historic names for WMU's official online library catalog. This catalog is used to identify books (including online books), government documents, journals, videos, sound recordings, slides and other items that the University Libraries has in its collections. WestCat can be searched by title, author, subject heading, keyword, call number, and more.

Advanced Search
This is an option for searching WestCat. Multiple words or phrases that are "your language," not known to be from the official subject heading list, can be entered. However, the system only finds books that use the same word or words in their catalog entries. As a result, no book in our collection may contain all of the words and phrases that you enter. If no titles appear, try synonyms or fewer headings--or select a heading(s) from the Library of Congress Subject Headings. When a list of titles appears, review them and then select those that might contain relevant information. On the screens that appear after clicking on a title, there are official Library of Congress subject headings that are linked to other books on the same topic.

WorldCat Comprehensive catalog of books and other materials in libraries around the world. Contains millions of records in hundreds of languages. Nonbook materials include (among other publication formats) the titles of journals and magazines, manuscripts, maps, electronic resources, websites, computer programs, musical scores, films, slides, sound recordings, conference proceedings, and videotapes. Items located through WorldCat must be requested through Interlibrary Loan unless they are also listed in the WMU libraries catalog, WestCat.

National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints. Z881 .A1 U518 Waldo Library, Lower level, Central Hallway.
This 685-volume set, arranged by authors, is a compilation of the cataloged holdings of selected portions of the majors research libraries of the United States and Canada, including the Library of Congress, for books published before 1965. Also includes more rarely held items in the collections of smaller and specialized libraries. The complete set encompasses about 10 million entries and indicates locations in more than 700 libraries. This major undertaking took 12 years to complete, and it is sometimes referred to as Mansell (who was the publisher).

Finding Journal Articles

America: History and Life Indexes and abstracts 2,100 journals, book and media reviews, and dissertations about the history and culture of the US and Canada. Searches by subject, author, title, time period, or document type. Coverage from 1964 to the present. Updated monthly.

American National Biography Authoritative biographical essays on more than 17,400 deceased Americans from all eras and walks of life published by Oxford University Press. Some of these entries are for literary figures.

Arts & Humanities Citation Index (Web of Science) The Arts & Humanities Citation Index is a multidisciplinary database that indexes 1,144 of the world's leading arts and humanities journals, and selected, relevant items from over 6,800 major science and social science journals. Coverage is from 1975 to the present.

Combined Retrospective Index to Journals in History, 1838-1974. (Z6205 .C18 Ref)
This 11-volume set indexes close to 1,000 journals that contain articles on all aspects of the world history. The journals were published from 1838 to 1974. The set is divided into two main sections: World History and American History, with a broad subject arrangement, both by names of the countries and subject areas.

Digital Dissertations.
This Dissertation Abstracts database from ProQuest has entries for more than 1.6 million dissertations and master's these from over 1,000 universities. Coverage is from 1861 to the present. Abstract are included from 1980 forward for doctoral dissertations, and from 1988 forward for master's theses for master's theses. Over 100,000 citations are available now at this Website. (Abstract for dissertations before 1980 are available in the paper version, Z 5055.U5 A53, Parts A & B, Waldo Library, General Stacks.)

America's Historical Newspapers 1690-1922 Full text images of articles from early American newspapers for over 700 newspapers from 24 Eastern states (not Michigan).

EconLit Indexes and abstracts over 400 journals and over 700 essay collections and other publications in economics from 1969 to the present. Updated monthly.

GenderWatch An historical and current perspective on the evolution of women's and gender issues. Full-text articles from over 200 scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, regional publications, as well as books, and reports. Coverage from 1970.

Historical Abstracts
Indexes and abstracts over 2,100 journals, books, and dissertations in world history, excluding the US and Canada, from 1450 to the present. Searches by subject, author, title, time period, or document type. Coverage: 1955 to present. Updated monthly.

Humanities Abstracts Indexes more than 465 major humanities journals in art, history, literature, philosophy, religion, music, and related areas. Coverage from 1984, abstracts from 1994 to the present.

International Medieval Bibliography An index to articles in journals and other publications about Europe, the Middle East and North Africa within the dates 400-1500 AD. Coverage: 1967-present. To search, click Enter Databases, then the GO button.
Print: Z 6203 .I62x (Ref) 1967-2004 This is a bibliography of the Middle Ages within the date range 400-1500 AD which covers Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. It includes articles published in journals and in other kinds of publications like conference proceedings, collected essays , Festschriften and exhibition catalogues published world-wide. Coverage from 1967 .To get to the search screen, click the Enter Databases button on the left side of the page, then the GO button next to International Medieval Bibliography Online.

19th Century Masterfile
This electronic index to the nineteenth century includes poole's Index to Periodical Literature, 4,000,000+ Citations from both popular and scholarly journals published from 1802 to 1906. WMU owns quite a few of these titles.

Readers' Guide Retrospective Indexes the most popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States from 1890 to 1982. Some of these periodicals published short stories and book reviews.
Print: AI 3 .R48 (Ref.) 1904-98

Social Sciences Abstracts Indexes over 600 periodicals in anthropology, economics, ethnic studies, feminist studies, geography, human services, international relations, law and criminology, police science, political science, population studies, psychology, public administration, public health, social work, sociology, urban studies, and related social science subjects. Coverage: indexing from 1983 and abstracts from 1994. Updated weekly.
Details

Social Sciences Citation Index (Web of Science) The Social Sciences Citation Index is a multidisciplinary database that indexes more than 1,725 journals spanning 50 disciplines, and selected, relevant items from over 3,300 of the world's leading scientific and technical journals. Disciplines include: anthropology, history, industrial relations, information & library science, law, philosophy, political science, psychiatry, psychology, public health, social issues, social work, sociology, urban studies, women's studies. Because the information about each article includes the article's cited reference list (or bibliography), you can also search the databases for articles that cite a known author or work. Coverage is from 1956 to present. Please LOGOFF, so others may use the database.

Sociological Abstracts
Indexes an international selection of publications in sociology and related disciplines from over 1,800 journals, serials, books, conference papers, and dissertations. Indexing and abstracting from 1952, and cited references with links from 2001. Updated monthly.

Finding Primary Sources & Manuscripts

ArchivesUSA Includes three major resources: a directory of manuscript repositories; records from the National Union Catalogue of Manuscript Collections from the 1950s to the present covering 93,000 collections; and detailed subject indexing for over 58,000 collections in the microfiche series, the National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States (NIDS).

CIS Index to Publications of the United States Congress.
(KF 49.C621x, Gov.Documents, Index Tables).
This is a monthly publication that provides detailed indexing and brief abstracts of the following types of Congressional publications: comittee hearings, House and Senate documents and reports, and Senate treaty documents. Indexes are arranged by subjects and names (including names of witnesses at hearing, etc.); titles; bill, report and document number; and committee and subcommittee chairs.

Finding Primary Documents in WestCat and on the Web. Developed by WMU Libraries, this guide offers links to several excellent sites that discuss the historical research process, directories of historical resources on the Web, and links to collections of primarily documents easily accessible on the Web.

National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections.
(Z 6620 .U5 N3 Ref).
Compiled by the Library of Congress, this multi-volume set includes reproductions of catalog cards for manuscript collections reported by repositories throughout the United States during each period covered. Each entry gives the number of items, physical description, scope and content, location, restrictions on access, finding tools, and availability of microfilm.

The Digital Classroom: Educators and Students Sponsored by the National Archives and Records Administration, this site contains useful information about historical resources and how to use them in the classroom. It includes sections on conducting research and finding primary sources, along with sections on history in the raw (letters, memoirs, dairies, etc.), document analysis worksheet and National History Day.

WestCat and WorldCat
SEARCH TIP: When looking for primary documents in either of WestCat or WorldCat databases, use the word sources in your advanced keyword search. Other good search terms to use are letters; diaries; correspondence; reminiscences; personal narratives; oral history.

Digital Collections & Information

African American Newspapers: The 19th Century Eventually this database will contain the full-text of major 19th century African-American newspapers providing first-hand stories by way of biographies as well as statistics, essays, editorials, and advertisements serving as primary source historical documentation. Search individual newspapers or group together.

American Civil War: Letters & Diaries This full text database includes more than 100,000 pages written by over 2,000 persons, primarily letters and diaries from the Civil War. Also includes biographies and an extensive bibliography.

American Memory Multimedia collections from the Library of Congress of digitized documents, photographs, sound recordings, motion pictures, and texts. Over 100 collections, including, for example, African-American pamphlets, Chautauqua flyers, Depression photographs, Coca-Cola advertising, and the papers of Alexander Graham Bell, to name just a few.

British Periodicals Search the full text of 160 British journals from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth. Topics include literature, philosophy, history, science, the fine arts and the social sciences.

Early Encounters in North America: Peoples Cultures, and the Environment This full text database includes more than 100,000 pages of letters, diaries and other accounts of traders, explorers, native peoples, and others from 1534 to 1850. Indexed by place, year, peoples, cultural events, and other categories.

Early English Books Online EEBO consists of digitized versions of microfilms from two sets which WMU owns: Early English books, 1475-1640 (Microfilms AC 1 2nd floor, Waldo), and Early English books, 1641-1700 (Microfilms AC 2). Start with the EEBO search engine to locate a text. If it has not been digitized, search WestCat by title or author and use the microfilm. The English Short Title Catalogue 1473-1800 on CD-Rom (Rare Books Room CD Z 21) is a useful index to this source.

HarpWeek Full-text as well as images from the important American magazine Harper's Weekly. Coverage: 1857-1912. Scanned images and text from Harper's Weekly published during the Civil war Era and Reconstruction Period (8157-1912). HarpWeek can be both searched and browsed.

Historical Newspapers Search all of these newspapers at once or individually for full-text articles in this index:
Atlanta Constitution (1868 - 1939)
Atlanta Daily World (1931-2003)
The Chicago Defender (1905 - 1975)
Chicago Tribune (1849 - 1985)
Christian Science Monitor (1908 - 1993)
Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005)
Los Angeles Times (1881 - 1985)
New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993)
The New York Times (1851 - 2003)
Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002)
The Wall Street Journal (1889 - 1989)
The Washington Post (1877 - 1990)

In the First Person: Index to Letters, Diaries, Oral Histories, and Other Personal Narratives This index lets users perform searches within letters, diaries, oral histories, memoirs, and autobiographies that are freely available on the Web and in Alexander Street databases. Users can access thousands of personal narratives in English from archives and repositories everywhere. Includes links to full text, audio, and video whenever available.

Making of America (Cornell University)

Making of America (University of Michigan) A digital library of primary sources in American social history from the ante-bellum period through Reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. Includes over 4 million page images, representing close to 13,000 volumes of primary source materials, including books and periodicals. Cornell University has focused on the major journal literature of the period. The University of Michigan has focused on monographs.

Making of Modern Michigan
Hosted at Michigan State University, this is a full-text collaborative project involving more than 50 libraries in Michigan. It includes local history materials from Michigan communities, including such things as historical photographs, oral histories, family papers, genealogical materials, and much more. One can search by keyword, or browse through the subject, institution and type of material indexes.

North American Women's Letters and Diaries Over 150,000 pages of published and unpublished diaries and letters by over 1,300 women in the US and Canada from the colonial period to 1950. All ethnic groups, ages, classes, and geographical regions are included. Users can search by keyword, time period, place, marital status, nationality, and other variables.

Finding Book Reviews

Book Review Digest Indexes and excerpts reviews of English-language fiction and nonfiction books published in leading periodicals. Scholarly books, textbooks, government publications, and technical books are excluded. Online coverage: 1983-present. Updated weekly.

Book Review Index Provides reviews of general interest and some scholarly books published in the US since 1965. This doesn't have the excerpts from reviews that Book Review Digest provides, nor does it go back to 1905, but it does index many more periodicals.
Print: Z 1035 .A1 B6 (Ref)

Combined Retrospective Index to Book Reviews in Scholarly Journals, 1886-1974 Z 1035 .A1 C64 (Ref)
This 15-volume set offers title and author access to over one million book reviews that appeared in the backfiles of about 460 scholarly journals in the fields of History, Political Science, and Sociology between 1886 and 1974. Reviews are arranged by author's last name.

Combined Retrospective Index to Book Reviews in Humanities Journals, 1802-1974 Z 1035 .A1 C63x (Ref)
A 10-volume set that includes close to 500,000 book review citations from the backfiles of 150 humanities journals, mostly focusing on Literature, Religion, and Philosophy. Reviews are arranged by author's last name.

Finding Web Sources

To help navigate through the vast number of resources on the Web, began by using any of the following subject guides to resources found on the WMU Libraries' home page. The following are just a sampling of what is available.

SEARCH TIP: Use the Google search engine to find more sites on the Web. Google is an excellent and rather selective search engine developed by graduate students at Stanford University. For best results, use quotation marks " " around phrases, and the plus sign + in front of a phrase.
Try the Advanced Search in Google to fine-tune your search even more. You might try limiting your results to just Web sites with the ".edu" domain to obtains sites from colleges and universities.

Using Interlibrary Loan

The University Libraries is happy to assist you borrow materials from other libraries if we do not own them. Before using WMU's Interlibrary Loan service, you must first register and set up an account. Click on Submit a Request and follow the prompts for First Time Users.

Once you have registered, you may request your materials online through the Libraries' Web site. (The link to Interlibrary Loan is under "Get It " on the Libraries' home page.)If you request an article, we will copy it from another library and mail it to you directly and it is yours to keep. If you request books or dissertations, you will receive a notice in the mail when the material is in and ready for you.

Citing Your Sources

The History Department suggests you use the following citation manual.

The Chicago Manual of Style
Z 253 .C57 15th 2003 (Reference Desk Collection)
This a detailed and comprehensive guide to papers, articles, theses, and dissertations used by WMU's Department of Political Science. Consult this for the proper format for your research paper references. Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term papers, Theses, and Dissertations (LB 2369.T8 1996 Ref Desk Coll) is a condensation of this source. WMU Libraries has compiled the following concise guide:"Turbian's A manual for Writers: Brief Guide" that you may consult for citation tips.

Tips for Citing Web Sources For examples of how to cite electronic sources in the Chicago style, consult the guide Using Chicago Style to Cite and Document Sources.

Ask A Librarian

Maria A. Perez-Stable, E-mail: maria.perez-stable@wmich.edu
Phone: 269-387-5322
Last updated: August 2008